Chrome comes out of beta on Mac & Linux

Google has fired up its development engines and brought Chrome out of beta on Mac and Linux. Stable versions
have been issued for both platforms which the company reckons are
good enough for primetime.

There's a stack of new features on both platforms. HTML5 is a big focus, and support for geolocation APIs, app
cache, web socks and drag-and-drop features have arrived. There's
also synchronisation of bookmarks and browser preferences --
including themes, homepage, web content, language, page zoom and
startup settings -- along with the ability for extensions to work
in incognito mode.

The milestone marks the browser's entry into the big leagues, gaining marketshare from rivals. Firefox has been feeling the
burn the most, with the browser's once-inexorable growth now
stunted by its new rival. In fact, for some months now, Chrome has
been the only browser whose userbase has grown in significant
numbers, though it's still far below even the 10 percent
marker.

The stable release on Mac & Linux follows the company's I/O developer conference, where it announced Google TV and Android 2.2. Chrome, in contrast, was relatively
underrepresented, with only the announcement of an app store for
web apps which will be integrated into forthcoming versions. Many
people questioned the future of the company's netbook-oriented ChromeOS, but Google has so far stayed tight-lipped.

If you want to download the new stable release of the browser
and try it out, head over to the Mac or Linux
download pages.